


kiss my mouth; hell is here

by evocativecomma



Category: Far Cry 5
Genre: F/M, Not Canon Compliant, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-26
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-12 08:01:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29007222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evocativecomma/pseuds/evocativecomma
Summary: After her time in the Whitetails, Jude has been having screaming nightmares. For a moment, when she wakes up in the woods in Holland Valley, she's not sure if she's in another one. But it's only John.
Relationships: Deputy | Judge/John Seed, Female Deputy | Judge/John Seed
Comments: 1
Kudos: 6





	kiss my mouth; hell is here

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, John is a Bad Man who does murder and other things; yes, Jude makes bad decisions and will continue to make bad decisions. This is my very specific self-indulgent universe and it involves blood and kissing.

Flames leaping to life beside her wake Jude from uneasy sleep; before her eyes even open she seeks out both knife and pistol, their well-worn grips fitted to her hands. She'd thrown water on the smoldering ashes of her campfire before falling asleep with her back against the trunk of a wide tree, but it blazes before her now. She straightens against the tree as best she can, curling her finger around the pistol's trigger as the night comes into focus, her dazzled eyes and sleep-blurred mind slow to resolve the images around her into information she can use.

"Hello, Deputy Stills."

John Seed sits across the flames from her. The butt of a gun glints at his hip beneath the fall of his long coat, but he holds his hands out open before him, warming them as he watches her without blinking. A hunting rifle rests against a tree about a dozen paces behind him. The light plays along the tattoos on his fingers as he shifts them this way and that, a confusion of letters and shadows.

"John." The number of times she has to blink for his face to truly come into focus makes her feel more vulnerable than facing him in only her torn tank top and unbuttoned jeans; the light woven blanket Adelaide gave her still drapes over her chest, but that small security is outweighed by her lack of boots—they sit beside her pack, a yard away, and she knew it might bite her in the ass but she'd been so desperate to give her bleeding feet a break…

Jude exhales sharply through her nose, squaring her shoulders and holding her chin high—determined to meet John on as even a playing field as she can, despite the fact that she looks more scarecrow than woman.

John tilts his head in acknowledgment as he takes her in from head to bare feet; she wonders how long he sat and watched her before she woke. "A curious thing, Deputy," he says, almost as though he's not speaking to her at all, only gossiping about the night with the trees. "I was on my way up the mountain to check in on the construction of a silo with some of my men, and through the trees I heard a bloodcurdling scream. The sound of a fox in a trap, almost. It chilled me to the marrow of my bones, overwhelmed me with nausea." He catches her eyes and holds them.

"It was the most beautiful thing I've ever heard."

Her grip tightens on the knife, her best cared for possession. She tries not to blink no matter how much her eyes burn.

"Imagine my surprise when I stumbled across you, back in the Valley and trembling beside a dying fire. I had long since sent my men on ahead, of course." Jude's gaze had wandered from his, searching the shadows of the forest for others as he spoke. "I knew I had to follow the sound, and I find that most religious experiences are best enjoyed as solitary things."

"A religious experience? You flatter me, John." Knowing that he could have killed her a thousand different ways by now, Jude carefully sets the gun down just within reach; her fingers loosen slightly on the hilt of her knife as she stretches, allowing herself one more weakness in the long line she's presented her enemy.

John stands slowly, his eyes never leaving her as he stalks to the near side of the fire, sitting on the ground in front of her, barely a foot away. She can feel his gaze like a touch on the shadowed curves of her throat. "I think my brothers have underestimated you." The ease with which he admits it catches her off-guard. "I'm not sure whether God has sent you as a trial or a gift, Deputy Stills, but He has sent you."

"For what?" Jude would stretch her legs out if it didn't mean she'd be nearly touching him; as it is, his eyes linger again on her bare feet, on the long tear in her jeans and the healing gash in her thigh beneath and she shivers with it.

"For me," he says, and for a moment it's true. For a moment, it's the only true thing she's ever heard. John Seed says that she was brought to Hope County—put on Earth—for him at the end of the world, and it's true. Jude's grip on the knife falters. "I am to lead you to atonement; you are to be lead. Bridges have two sides, after all."

Something gnaws at Jude's insides, and despite John Seed before her, she realizes it's only hunger. Still holding the knife with one hand, she begins to reach for her pack with the other; John passes it to her. It's impossible to miss the weakness of her arm as she takes it. Adelaide's blanket falls the rest of the way down her torso, revealing the livid red-violet bruising of her recently dislocated shoulder. She digs out a granola bar and pulls the small comfort around her like armor, rummaging for a water bottle before nudging the bag back out of the way.

"When's the last time you really ate, Deputy?" Blanket cast aside, her body seems more hollows than flesh—negative space tracing out where a woman ought to be. John imagines he could reach out and wrap his fingers entirely around her collarbone with no resistance.

"This morning," she says. "Say what you mean—and you'll have to ask your brother how long I starved, anyway. Hard to keep track of time in a cage, and being thrown off a cliff and left for dead hardly does a girl any favors."

As she speaks he sees flickers of the girl she must have been once, before the string of tragedies that drove her west. It's in the tilt of her chin, arrogant even now, half-broken and more than half-starved before him. That pricks at him; Jacob ought to have known better, marked for John as she is and has been. He doesn't appreciate the delicate, divine puzzle of her, being always the man with the metaphorical hammer. Joseph sees the spark trapped behind the moving pieces, but he would become too entangled in trying to solve it for himself, and here is why she belongs to John:

If he presents the proper leverage, she will spring the mechanism herself.

"I am sorry for that, Deputy." John stands and walks into the trees to search for fallen branches. As slowly as he moves, she flinches as though at the suddenness and her chest heaves with each quick, shallow breath. The knife comes up again. Between them, thick as honey, linger the ghostly notes of his brother's godforsaken song. He makes eye contact with her for as long as he can before deliberately giving her his back.

The snapping of new branches in the flames nearly swallows her next words. "A bridge is no good to someone who's already drowning, John."

They are standing in a frigid river, the inexorable heat of John's hand on her shoulder burning through her nearly destroyed shirt. He waves away the man reaching out to take her away, presses the Book of Joseph into his chest without ever looking away from her. Every drop of water trailing down her throat has his full attention.

In the woods, on the mountain, John sits down before her again with his hands empty. "I would never have let you drown, Deputy."

In the river, John places his other hand on top of her head and pushes her below the surface. Jude's breath leaves her almost immediately, and under the water her body remembers the gentle carrels of Del's hands on her scalp, cradling her skull as she meticulously shaved away thick locks of dark hair from one side of Jude's head. In the dark comes Del's voice in her ear as she shakes the chin-length mess of her hair. "Don't you feel so much lighter now, love?" And she does, in the dark, but there's something else—she can't reconcile this memory with the feel of clawing flesh beneath her fingernails.

"Judith." In the woods, on the mountain, she chokes out her name with a throat suddenly tight and burning. She should say more, say that no one has called her Judith since Del, but now Jude doesn't fit any better; she's running out of people to be and thinks she might as well call this empty thing she's become Judith.

Judith." John says it slowly, savoring the shape of it with a small smile. "Have you come to take our heads?" He reaches out a single finger to touch the tip of the blade she has kept raised between them. "Where, then, is your handmaiden? Why are you all alone, Judith?"

"I'm no one's deputy any more." As she stares at him, the flames light the deep brown of her eyes to honey gold, and John couldn't look away if the Collapse started right here. "I'm not the law," she says quietly. "I've heard your men call me an avenging angel, and I'm not that, either. Not a leader, not a soldier, not a judge." She spits the word and John nearly flinches at it.

Like lightning, she reaches out and grips his arm, pulling him in and pressing the knife into his palm. He didn't see her reverse it, but he holds the grip, still warm from her skin. In her hand rests the blade, and she steadily points it toward her heart.

"What was it your brother said, John?" She is barely inches away, her shaking breaths a hot wash against his face. "And I saw, behold it was a white horse… And Hell followed with him." She starts to laugh, high and manic, the knife scraping against her skin with every inhale.

"That's it. That's what's left. I'm just…hell."

She's shaking harder now, and John rips his arm from her grasp, throwing the knife aside. Jude gasps sharply as the blade drags across her fingers, blood welling up immediately. She stares at it, the laughter startled from her. Her smile is still too wide, too sharp, and her breaths are ragged, but her eyes seem slightly more focused when they land on him.

"Take it away, John." There's something like a sob caught in her throat, and the break of her voice chills him deeper than the screams that drew him here. "Cut it out. Carve it into my skin if that's what it takes. I just—" Jude watches him with an animal light in her shifting eyes, the startling closeness of her hitting John harder than her first touch. "I want to be alive again, John."

Judith crashes into him, knocking him back into the leaf litter. For a moment, he can only be grateful that he tossed the knife clear of either of them, but in the next it’s all as clear as a winter morning: Jude's teeth clattering against his own; Jude's bloody hand pressed to his face, the other fisted in the front of his shirt; Jude's weight draped haphazardly across him, feeling light as air.

Stillness seems beyond her—she writhes and presses and drags her wounded hand along his neck and shoulder. She gasps against his mouth until finally it's too much, chest heaving as they break apart.

"Deputy— Judith—" She is smoldering before him now, the light kindling he'd provided growing into a blaze not even John himself anticipated. Carve it into my skin, she'd said, and some dark, yawning, unsatisfied thing in his chest broke free and reached for her. "Judith…"

Whatever he meant to say is gone as he wraps his hand around the back of her neck and brings their mouths together again. The words don't matter any more. Judith's pulse beats away beneath his thumb. Alive, alive, alive, it chants, and his own joins the rhythm. Mine, mine, mine, it rumbles, wrapped up in tendrils of the darkness blooming in him.

John sits up, Jude's slight weight no obstacle at all. The thought comes unbidden as he bites her lip and holds her as she shudders through it—every moment since the arrest, since she’d walked down that chapel aisle toward him: the interrupted baptism, Jacob’s failure to break her, the new scar on Joseph’s hand where this creature with so much hell inside her bit him as he reached out to her… Every midnight conversation over their radios, talking each other in circles while watching the same stars. He’d said she was brought here for him and he meant it, and every moment that lead to this one is only more proof. Her breath in his mouth, her hands at his throat, her blood on his face, her, her, her… Mine, mine, mine.

He growls against her mouth when she digs her nails into his shoulders, pressing her backwards and delighting in the way she moves with him like water over rocks. He moves closer, certain that if he tries hard enough they’ll disappear inside of each other—complete, divine, alive.

Judith’s back hits the tree with a jolt and she breaks away with a scream, the shrill cry splitting the night as she instinctively cradles her injured arm, the tender flesh alight with pain at the impact. She grits her teeth and tries to contain the animal sounds welling in her throat; over the blood rushing in her ears, she can’t tell if she succeeds. John is still pressed against her, breathing heavily, and she feels the edge of hysterical laughter bubble back up through her lips as she meets her eyes. It builds until the dam breaks and she’s giggling madly, hand pressed against her mouth to smother the sound.

John reaches for her but she’s too tired to even flinch, the overflowing electricity of letting go all drained away and leaving her more hollow than before. He takes her free hand between his and studies it with the intensity that only John can, brushing his thumb along her pal,.

Even beneath the emptiness that’s come over her, John can see something new burning, stretching just under her skin. That animal clarity is still in her eyes, and she relaxes into his touch, seemingly transfixed by her own smeared bloody handprint on his cheek. For his part, John can’t stop stealing glances at her red, swollen mouth. The mechanism he’s seen within her, has broken—and she broke it herself, just like he knew she could. The cage is destroyed, and she’ll never be able to hide inside it again.

His movement startles her. John gently shifts her off of his lap, reaching behind her until he finds Adelaide’s blanket. Jude watches unblinking as he shakes it out to her side and then wraps it back around her shoulders. Her hands fist in the scratchy material without her mind’s orders. Tomorrow this will hurt. Tonight there’s nothing left.

So slowly Jude thinks she may already be dreaming, John Seed presses a kiss to her forehead. "Sleep, Judith," he says. "I’ll tend the fire. Keep the wolves at bay." He stands then, returns to watching her across the flames as he had been when she woke.

Tomorrow this will hurt. Tonight the wolves do not visit again.

Judith sleeps.

**Author's Note:**

> Listen, there's a universe where this fic exists except they definitely fuck, but it's not this one for a lot of reasons. In my specific, self-indulgent little universe here, John and Jude talk over the radios at night when they can't sleep because I love that trope, and John released Joey as a show of good faith. I don't know how else they got here or where else they're going, but we might find out! It's not gonna be pretty: Jude is 100% a feral knife girl because if I don't get to at least write someone going off the deep end, I am going to go apeshit myself. But like, I can't help the tenderness either.
> 
> Title from "No One Would Riot For Less" by Bright Eyes.
> 
> Come visit me on [tumblr](http://sailormoonweaver.tumblr.com)! Come yell about things with me. I'll share my character playlists with you! Jude's is very in-depth.


End file.
